A group of Canadian bitcoin nodes has officially rejected the Bitcoin Unlimited (BU) hard fork proposal.

“We strongly believe that a hard-fork, as actively considered by Bitcoin Unlimited or Bitcoin Classic, would cause massive disruption in our ability to onboard new Bitcoin users and would create irreparable damage to Bitcoin and to our businesses. We unequivocally oppose the Bitcoin Unlimited network split proposal.”, stated the group in a statement published on hackermoon.com.

The statement was posted by Francis Pouliot, CEO of Satoshi Portal and director of Bitcoin Embassy, and signed by Canadian investors, merchants and users that use bitcoin daily.

Support for Segregated Witness

The 16 undersigned parties underlined that they support Segregated Witness as an immediate solution to the bitcoin scaling challenge.

“Any contentious hard fork of the Bitcoin blockchain shall be considered an alternative cryptocurrency (altcoin), regardless of the relative hashing power on the forked chain.”, the Canadian bitcoin nodes wrote.

According to them, a hard fork as represented by BU or Bitcoin Classic, would disrupt the ability to bring on new bitcoin users. Thus, the bitcoin business will witness a general disruption, as cryptocoinnews.com noted.

“We unequivocally oppose the Bitcoin Unlimited network split proposal.”, added the group as quoted by cryptocoinnews.com.

Calling for safeguards

The group called for the following safeguard, so that it can support the proposed hard fork, as reported by cryptocoinnews.com:

Clear activation and on-chain coordination processes.

An extensive grace period reflecting a conservative assessment of node upgrade capacity.

Robust two-way replay protection that doesn’t weigh heavily on users.

Wipe-out protection; the hard fork has to be permanent.

Fully open sourced at all times of the development and deployment.

Tested and peer reviewed extensively.

Anticipated risks

The Canadian group of nodes also thinks that the proposed hard fork poses many risks. Some of them were listed by cryptocoinnews.com: